Problem with myldsmail servers...

We have a son serving in Peru and noticed recently his emails were taking several hours to reach certain recipients. Then, last week we heard nothing at all, which is unlike him. We contacted the Mission President's wife and after research done on their end, discovered the Church's servers were having problems. I emailed the Church directly and heard nothing back - of course.

What a frustrating scenario - missionaries are required to use the Church's email system, but it apparently isn't very reliable at times. Yes, I understand the effort it takes to run a large scale email system. I've worked for large corporations before, and we've never had issues where emails sent just never arrived - poof - gone.

Point being, if you are going to require people to use a certain system, that system should work - with redundancies in place, especially if the user is in a far away, 3rd world country! Duh.

And to the guy (I know you are out there - I already saw your post in an older thread) who is thinking "Well, in my day it took two weeks to send a letter" - great, and what if your letters just never arrived? Wouldn't that worry your Mom? Double duh.

Anyway, I bring this up because there may be other worried parents who have no idea why they all of the sudden do not hear from their children - it may be a problem with the Church's email servers, and you would never know because there is no feedback loop in place to warn you. Your best option is to contact the Mission President, because the Church tech people will not answer your inquiries (likely not nearly enough staff to take responses).

Maybe it's because I'm an IT guy, but I can understand how problems can occur in a large IT infrastructure like the Church has. I'm confident that the IT department is working diligently to address the cause of this issue. I'm sure many of them were missionaries or had their own children serve so they understand the importance of those weekly emails. I'm sure their focus is on solving the problems.

I have two missionaries out right now, a daughter in Bosnia and a son in Connecticut. We were fortunate to receive emails from both this week. We also got an email from my daughter's mission office explaining that they had heard about email issues and they instructed the missionaries to resend emails later that week.

I think everyone involved, from IT staff to the missions themselves will do what they can to resolve the problem quickly.

Dave

Thanks for your response Dave.

I think your children's Missions are more "on the ball" than my son's. We still have not heard directly from the mission, but thankfully did hear from our son just this morning with a very short note saying he was given 5 minutes to tell us he is alright.

I'm unclear about your point though - are you saying this kind of failure is common place in the IT world? I've never had emails just disappear in the 2 decades I've been sending them. Maybe I'm lucky? Maybe no one reads my emails anyway and I'd never know?

My point is NOT that there are terrible, incompetent, careless people running the email system - I have no idea about that. As I stated, I simply wish to put this out there so parents who ARE affected (glad to hear you weren't) know there is an issue, since not all were contacted directly by missions. Also, I wish there was a better feedback loop available. When I have experienced email issues, typically a warning is be sent out to all users that issues are/were occurring. This would be a good thing to put into place here, given the somewhat dangerous parts of the world these missionaries are serving, and the fact that the Church has every 'bit' (did you see that? there's a tech pun for you) of my contact information humanly possible. Hopefully this reaches ears who are able to consider it.

stonzthro wrote:Hopefully this reaches ears who are able to consider it.

Realize that many of us here in the forum are members like yourself, and not church employees or software developers. While "ears who are able to consider it" may see it here, they may not! I normally tell you to submit feedback, using a feedback link, but I realize you don't have access to one from within myldsmail.net. If you've submitted feedback via a general link on LDS.org, I believe it will find the right department. As a parent of a missionary, I am indeed sorry for your frustration.

kisaac
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